


Cor Leonis Takes on the World

by ohmyfae



Series: Dads of the Year [6]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Background Regis/Clarus, Dad!Cor, Gen, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-18 19:31:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11881287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyfae/pseuds/ohmyfae
Summary: Cor Leonis’ journey from a scrappy, reckless street kid to the man who would one day be called the Immortal is thrown off-kilter by the appearance of a small, fragile scrap of humanity that will change his priorities—and his understanding of the world—forever.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That’s right, folks. Dad!Cor returns. This time, his story starts quite a bit earlier, but don’t worry, we’ll be getting to the good stuff soon enough!

The sky over Insomnia’s midsummer festival was heavy with fat, leaden storm clouds, which loomed in a threatening mass over the spires of the Citadel. They scudded through scraps of blue to cast patches of shadow over the crowd below, and lent their own ominous rumbles to the hammer of feet and the hum of traffic. Deep in the press of bodies, Cor Leonis squinted at them, his small face screwed up in thought. 

He had to admit that as far as eight year-olds went, he wasn’t that impressive. He had his mother’s brown hair and his father’s eyes, which were dark and hooded and a little too intense, and he was just this side of scrawny. When his mother was alive, she used to call him “homely,” which after a few years on his own, Cor had learned was just another word for plain. Other kids in the lower city could smile and fawn and get a few coins of charity just for existing, but Cor was blessed with a sullen glare that never went away, so he had to find another path. 

Right now, it was a lucrative one. People in Insomnia tended to guard their pockets and purses pretty well throughout the year, but when summer festivals came around, they hid their money in the same places every time: Boot flaps, sashes, and sleeves. It was definitely easier than the goldfish game by the food stalls, though Cor did spend a few precious coins on _that_ just because. Not like he had anything to keep a fish _in._

He worked his way through the crowd, slipping through brightly-clad festival-goers like a grubby shadow, and came at last to his favorite part of the city: The courtyard in front of the Citadel. The people _there_ didn’t pay attention at all, so Cor got all the way to the front of the crowd, right at the velvet rope separating them from the carpeted path leading to the main doors. 

Cor clutched the rope in both hands. Not even thirty feet away, walking down the steps of the Citadel, was the royal family. The queen was all in blue, a hand on the swell of her belly, with a crown that arced like lightning in a spiral behind her head. The king had grey threading through his dark hair, and his black cape brushed at his heels as he walked alongside his wife. To his left, a boy of about thirteen followed a step behind, his shoulders straight, chin up, looking every inch the perfect, unapproachable prince. 

They were like something out of a painting. Too polished, like dolls someone had let out of a cabinet to be admired. Cor lifted himself up on his toes as they stopped, flanked by their guards, to speak to some sort of priest dressed in white. Next to the priest was a girl about the prince’s age, with thick black hair and eyes that smiled even when her mouth did not. She curtseyed to the king and queen, then turned to the prince and tilted her head.

The prince’s face flushed an uneven scarlet. 

Cor grinned. _This_ was better than a theater. Who _was_ she? What was she saying? Why was the king laughing? Cor inched closer, pushing against the rope, and that’s when he saw it.

Light, flickering where light had no reason to be, in the darkness of a pillar. 

He moved without thinking. Blades shrieked out of their sheaths as Cor ducked under the rope and went pelting towards the light. A hand grabbed him by the arm—Cor shouted, pointing towards the flickering dot in the shadow, and slammed his foot down on his captor’s toes. The man let go, and Cor took off again. 

As he passed the royal family, he saw that everyone, even the strange girl with the priest, was staring at him in shock.

Everyone except the queen.

She had turned to face the same light that Cor saw, and her face went pale and slack. She called out a name—her accent was too thick for Cor to understand—and slid an arm over the king’s shoulder, pushing him back. Cor looked away when he heard the sickening _crack_ of gunfire, and a scream rose from the crowd, discordant and terrible. 

He kept running. The guards of King Mors were fast, but Cor was _faster,_ years of hiding from the lawkeepers of the city pushing him further than those who never had to run to survive. He reached the spot of shadow, and didn’t even stop when he saw the gun, abandoned on the stone. The man who’d held it was darting around the bend towards the Citadel hedge maze, and Cor ignored the pounding of his heart and scrambled after him. The maze was open to the public most of the year, and Cor knew what most strangers wouldn’t, that there were little pools and fountains scattered throughout, ready to trip you up…

There! A crash, and a muffled curse. Cor used a lamppost to push himself in the direction of the noise, and went barreling into a tall, gangly man in grey and white, who swore and flailed as they both went tumbling into a fountain.

The man kicked, and his heel collided with Cor’s jaw. Cor growled and clamped his teeth over the man’s arm. “What the hell? The Crownsguard hires fucking _kids_ now?”

Cor’s vision went white as he was slammed back into the cobbles of the path. _Hell._ He hadn’t really thought about what he’d do when he _caught_ the guy. He dug his nails into the soft flesh of the man’s inner elbow, and got a blow to the ear for his efforts. Dizziness threatened to overwhelm him—Cor held on, and spat out the taste of blood as he lifted his head.

“You tried to turn a gun on the royal _family,_ ” Cor said, and then all his breath left him as a sharp, hot pain flared in his side. His fingers slipped from the man’s arm, and he fell, impossibly far, and the crack of his head hitting the ground was muffled around the searing sting of the man’s knife as it jostled against his hipbone, pulling the wound wider. He tried to sit up, but he could barely feel his fingers, and he couldn’t even get up the breath to scream his frustration as the man stood, as he turned to run, as he—

Went down in a crackle of violet and white electrical spots. 

It was like Cor was sitting under a glass bowl. The sound of voices came out muzzy and low, and the hand that reached for him seemed to warp and shift in size. A face he vaguely knew stared down at him, speaking in that funny, incoherent baritone, and even though the eyes were all wrong and he’d never had a beard so far as he remembered, Cor knew who it was.

“Dad,” he said, and his father’s face went pinched and tight as he sank, helpless, into the dark.

 

\---

 

Cor woke surrounded by softness. The lights were dim, a fire crackled and spat somewhere out of view, and he was surrounded by blankets thicker than his arm. For a dead man, he couldn’t deny that he was doing pretty well for himself. He sat up, and winced at the flare of pain in his side.

That wasn’t right. Dead people weren’t supposed to feel _pain._

“Took you long enough,” said a cracking, boyish voice at his side. Cor jumped, and turned to find the prince of Lucis sitting in a chair next to what had to be the most luxurious bed Cor had ever seen. Which Cor was _lying_ in.

“Your majesty!” he said, and frantically scooted towards the end of the bed. The prince grabbed his wrist, surprisingly strong for such a skinny teenager, and pulled him back. 

“It’s highness,” said the prince. “But I think it’s okay if you call me Regis when no one’s around.”

Cor tried not to stare. Calling the prince by his first name was asking too much. “Yes, your… um.”

“Usually,” the prince—no, Regis—said, smiling just a little, “you’re supposed to give _your_ name when someone gives you theirs.”

“Oh. It’s Cor. Cor Leonis.”

“Nice,” said Regis. He let go of Cor’s wrist, and stood. “How are you feeling? Dad had to use an elixir on you to stitch the wound shut, you know. What on _earth_ were you doing, running after a man with a gun? Do they grow them reckless in the city? Aulea’s the same, I swear, it’s like there’s something in the water—“

“I… we’re supposed to boil water…” Cor said, more than a little dazed. Regis’ mouth opened, and he covered his eyes with a hand. When he took his hand away, he was standing straighter, once again a portrait of a prince rather than a curious, overexcited kid.

“I hope you know that you have done the royal family of Lucis a great service, Cor Leonis,” he said, and his voice took on an odd, formal tone. “If you hadn’t intervened when you did, it is likely that the king would have been killed.”

“No.” Cor’s hands clenched on the blankets. “But, but I mean. He had all those guards, one of them would’ve—“

“None of them saw what you did,” Regis said, his mask slipping. “And they certainly weren’t as fast.” He tugged at his collar. “I’ll need to tell the king that you’re awake. Do you need anything? Water, food, a potion?”

“What’s a potion?” Cor asked. Regis gave him a strange, distant look.

“Nothing, really,” he said. “But… before I go, I… I really am grateful, you know. The king isn’t just, well, the king. Not to me.”

Cor thought of the stories people told of the king in the city, the paintings that hung up on the walls of bars and diners, the magical light of the wall that shielded the city and the outlying region of Leide from Imperial fire.

“Me, neither,” he said.

Regis pulled the blankets back over Cor’s legs. “You’re a stand-up guy, Cor Leonis,” he said. 

“You’re not so bad yourself, Regis,” Cor said, and the prince smiled and, to Cor’s dismay, reached out to ruffle his hair.


	2. Chapter 2

When Cor was finally allowed to get out of bed, he was given a black shirt and trousers that were so light that he had to keep checking to make sure they were there. His old clothes looked filthy by comparison—and maybe they were, he realized. He used the town baths and sometimes washed his clothes in the fountain on Emerald Street, where the security lights were busted, but the last time he’d done _that_ was at least a week ago. When the prince, grinning at Cor’s bewildered look of alarm, told him he could use the bathroom if he wanted to, Cor ran for it.

The tiles in the bathroom were heated, the sink was made of clouded glass, and the shower had four different settings. Cor tried all of them. By the time he was done and the bathroom floor was a mess—he hadn’t realized that the shower door could close—he emerged in his borrowed clothes to find the prince sitting on the bed, knees drawn up to his chest, talking to a young man in Crownsguard black. Cor’s smile faded, and the man gave him a cursory look up and down, like he was sizing him up for a beating later. Cor’s hands clenched into fists behind his back. 

Then the man grinned. 

“You’re right, Reg,” he said, and pushed Regis’ shoulder lightly as he stood. Regis went toppling back onto the bed with a squeak, and the young man bowed to Cor. “I like him already. I hear you’re the hero of the hour. I’m Clarus.”

“Clarus _Amicitia?_ ” Cor asked. The man looked suddenly wary, the smile frozen on his face, and he dug a hand through his long dark hair. “The shield to the prince?”

“More like _nag_ to the—“ Regis started, and Clarus gently pushed him off balance again. Regis flailed as he toppled over the side of the bed. 

“I try,” Clarus said. 

Regis popped up over the edge of the mattress like a disgruntled cat, hair all mussed and eyes dark in a scowl. Cor struggled not to laugh. “Someone,” Regis said, “is cocky ever since they got their tattoo.”

“You’re just mad ‘cause Aulea said it looks nice.”

“She was rubbing your arms!” Regis cried. “That’s practically treason!”

“She’s twelve, Reg. She’s just a kid.” 

“Just a… I’m thirteen! Am _I_ Just a kid, Clar?” 

Clarus rolled his eyes. He winked at Cor, who felt a blush creeping up his neck. “Being a shield isn’t all honor and glory. Sometimes it means dealing with _this_ brat.”

Regis _growled,_ and Cor wondered if he was going to be witness to _two_ assassination attempts in one day when there was a knock on the open door.

“If you two are done,” said a light, raspy voice. Regis immediately straightened to attention, but Clarus only turned and inclined his head. The girl from the festival was there, still in her flower-patterned skirt and billowy shirt from earlier. Her dark eyes flitted from one boy to the other, finally landing on Cor. Her eyes crinkled in that half smile Cor had seen before, and she stepped into the room.

“Regis told me your name is Cor,” she said. “I’m Aulea. I live on Rose Street, next to the grocer’s. You know, the one with all the cats?”

“Everyone has a cat in _this_ town,” Cor said. Aulea shrugged and slipped an arm around Cor’s. 

“And now I have one,” Aulea said. “The rare Leonis. Come on.” She looked over her shoulder at the smirking Clarus and dumbstruck prince. “Their majesties are waiting.”

She towed Cor down the hallway. She was stronger than she seemed—No matter how Cor tried to stealthily slip out of her hold, the wiry muscles of her arms kept him locked to her side. She chattered while they walked, easing out bits and pieces of Cor’s daily life. _Have you been to the paper boat races by the shrine? No? You have to see them, my boat always sinks halfway. Oh! So you do know the train station dog. Isn’t he the ugliest thing you ever saw? I love him, don’t you?_ The endless stream of talk washed over him, pulling loose the anxious knot of fear that rolled in his stomach as they approached the throne room. 

When they reached the heavy wooden doors, flanked by imposing, black-clad attendants, Cor had somehow agreed to go to the movies with Aulea and Regis the next weekend. He wasn’t sure when it happened. He felt like he’d fallen into a skipping rope by accident and couldn’t get out, trapped by Aulea’s relentless enthusiasm and Regis’ cautious, secretive smile. 

“I can’t wait,” Aulea said, and whipped Cor around so she could tug at his collar. “Don’t worry about the king, by the way. He _likes_ people like you. You know. Stern, all business.”

“But I’m _not_ ,” Cor protested.

“Don’t bother arguing,” Regis said. “Aulie, you’re smothering him.”

Aulea slapped Regis on the shoulder, and he ducked his head. Clarus pushed the doors open, and a rush of cold air slapped Cor in the face. The throne room yawned before him, dark and limitless with its high roof and sloping walls, and he could feel himself shrinking into the floor as Regis and Clarus stepped forward, putting on their formal faces like they’d been born to it. 

At his side, Aulea winked and held her hand palm out between them. 

“You’ll be fine,” she whispered.

Cor looked from the sleek stone floors to the rows of plush curtains hanging over the pillars that led to the dais. There, the king and queen sat, both in royal black, at the center of the world. 

“I hope so,” he whispered back, and took Aulea’s hand.

 

\---

 

“Look who it is!” 

Cor jogged to a halt at the edge of the Crownsguard training yards, breathing hard. He’d run halfway across the Citadel, and his new uniform was hopelessly rumpled. He took a minute to adjust it—Now that he _had_ nice clothes, he was particular about keeping them that way—before he climbed over the fence and into the ring where the prince and his shield were sparring. 

Or trying to, anyways.

“Your defense is all over the place,” Clarus said, leaning on his sword as Regis tried to scramble to his feet. He jerked a chin towards Cor. “Can you believe this guy? Leaves his side wide open because he think he’s some kind of _mage._ ”

“I am, though,” Regis said. “This is ridiculous, Clarus. I’m five times better with magic than I am with a sword, and you know it.”

“Doesn’t magic run out?” Cor asked. Regis’ scowl darkened. “Anyways, I was told you had a message for me.”

“Oh, right.” Regis was always doing this. It had been three weeks since Cor was given a job as a messenger for the Council and the royal family, and every time Regis called on him, it was just a pretense to lure him away from work. Regis dug in his pocket and handed a piece of paper to Cor. “It’s for Clarus.”

Cor sighed, and passed the paper on. Clarus opened it and snorted.

“Asshole,” he read. “Nice. You gonna pick up your sword?” he asked. 

“I can shoot _lightning_ from my _hands,_ ” Regis said.

“Really?” Cor raised his eyebrows. “Can you do it now?”

Regis grinned, but Clarus stepped in before he could move. “No,” he said. “Not after last time.” He clapped his hands, and Regis groaned, picking up his sword. They faced off, and despite the fact that Cor knew he should be heading back to work, he leaned on the fence instead, watching.

Clarus walked with a swagger and tended to puff himself up when Regis was needling him, but in a fight, he moved like a dancer. He stepped in a pattern, or pieces of a pattern all jumbled together, and Cor started to see where the movement of his feet and the flicker of his blade joined up. When Regis blocked high, Clarus always went for a sideways sweep right after. When Regis tried to disarm him, his right foot shifted back to brace himself. Maybe Regis already knew, but if he did, why didn’t he use it? If it was _Cor_ in the ring, he’d take advantage of the way Clarus favored his right side and go for his knees, because Regis never went that low and it would probably throw him off. 

“Not bad,” Clarus said after a while, which was a lie. It _was_ bad. It was _terrible._ This, at least, Regis seemed to know. He frowned and muttered to himself as he put away his sword, and Clarus swung an arm around his shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, Reggie. No one ever starts out knowing what to do.”

Cor tried to duck out, claiming that work wasn’t over for another hour, but Regis monopolized him like always. It took a good two hours to get away, especially when Weskham, Regis and Clarus’ friend and an advisor on the Lucian Council, came by with food he’d stolen from the kitchens. Cor might have had more money than he’d ever owned in his life, but he wasn’t so prideful that he was going to turn down free food. 

Finally, when the afternoon was waning and the guards were all meandering towards the perimeter, he snuck out to the Crownsguard training yards on his own. Picking the lock to the toolshed was woefully easy, and Cor was rewarded with the sight of a whole row of swords, all strapped to the wall on the far side. There were buckets of wooden practice swords as well, but Cor ignored those, and went straight for the one he wanted: A katana, nestled in a blood-red sheath. 

His fingers had only just brushed the hilt when he heard a hoarse voice call out behind him.

“Don’t touch that unless you’ve earned it.”

Cor spun. Aulea stood at the door, wearing a short plaid dress and a stormy expression. He dropped his hand. 

“What are you doing here, Cor?” Aulea asked. Her voice always had a rough edge to it, but she sounded like a crow now, tinged with exhaustion.

“I wanted to…” Cor took a deep breath. “I saw Regis and Clarus fighting today.”

“Oh.” Aulea’s shoulders sank, and the forbidding look on her face shifted. “I’m sorry.”

“Is he always that bad?” Cor asked. “I thought the prince was supposed to know how to fight from _birth._ Everyone says the king’s the best fighter in Lucis, so why wouldn’t Regis—“

“The king _isn’t_ the best,” Aulea said. “Not anymore. No one can wear the ring for that long and not have something to show for it. That’s why they have shields.”

Except the king didn’t _have_ a shield, not anymore. Cor had heard about it around the time his parents had died. The whole lower city was quarantined for the Scourge, a disease that rotted the body from the inside out, but even a quarantine couldn’t contain a disease that moved through the air itself. When the king’s shield—Clarus’ father, Cor thought in horror—was diagnosed, the whole city erupted in panic. He’d been taken to the queen of Tenebrae, they said, but rumor was that his body had given out on the way there. 

And now the king had no one. It was a harrowing thought, and Cor felt fury building in the back of his mind, fury at the guards who hadn’t pushed themselves like _he_ had at the festival, hadn’t been _fast_ enough. If they really applied themselves, like Clarus did, maybe one of _them_ could have been Mors’ shield. Instead they just hung around the Citadel, disgracing their uniforms. 

“Hey.” 

Cor blinked. Aulea had snuck up on him, and had brushed her fingers over his nose to get his attention. “You’re a million miles away,” she said. “I asked, do you want to learn?”

“What, how to fight?” Cor looked back to the sword on the wall. “Sure, but… I mean, I have work, and Clarus isn’t…”

“Not from Clarus,” Aulea said. “From me.”

“ _You_ can’t fight,” Cor said. “You’re just a…” A small, withering piece of self-preservation reared its head, and Cor fell silent. 

“A _girl?_ ” Aulea asked. “A kid? You’re right, what _do_ I know? It’s not like I haven’t been betrothed to Regis since I was four. Not like I haven’t been training since I was five, because if _he’s_ gonna spend all day making roses out of fire, someone has to know how to swing a sword without hitting themselves. Or what?” She scrunched her eyes up in that odd little smile of hers. “Do you think being the prince’s betrothed is all opening grocery stores and kissing babies?”

“But you like babies,” Cor said, following after her as Aulea picked out two bamboo practice swords from a bucket. 

“People can like two things at once, you know,” Aulea said. She threw one of the swords at Cor, who fumbled when he caught it. “First thing’s first, my cat,” she told him. “Before you learn how to fight, you need to learn _everything._ Stand in the middle of the circle.”

“I’m not your _cat,_ ” Cor said, even as he obeyed. Aulea stood in front of him, and leaned over to tweak his ears. 

“Of course you are,” she said. “I always wanted one. Okay, show me how you’d hold a sword, and I’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong.”

Cor watched her warily, and spotted the lines at her eyes that served as Aulea’s laugh. “You’re gonna be a monster, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Oh, Cor,” Aulea said. “You have no idea.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is spending a little more time with young Cor than I thought, but there will be a few time skips after this chapter.  
> A miscarriage is implied in this chapter. I don't go into detail(that stuff hits too close to home!), but a warning, just in case.

Autumn was creeping up from the outskirts of the city when the queen was taken to the hospital three blocks from the Citadel. Cor spent most of the day riding his bike there and back, with his black jacket folded carefully in the basket with his gate pass. Wet leaves clotted his spokes and cats skittered out of his way as he moved from the street to the sidewalk and back again, dodging puddles. On his third trip to the hospital, he met an attendant at the gate, a young woman only a few years older than the prince, who held out a hand for the message he carried from the king. 

“Doin’ okay, Ms. Scientia?” Cor asked. He hunched over his handlebars to catch his breath. The attendant huffed. Her light brown hair fell over her eyes as she scanned the message. “You know, that’s kind of for the queen.”

“And my mother and I were on her majesty’s retinue from Tenebrae,” Ms. Scientia said. “Travel several hundred miles with someone, kitten, and you _might_ find yourself with a vested interest in their well-being.”

“Still spying. And my name’s Leonis.” _Damn_ Aulea and her nicknames. 

“I don’t know,” said Ms. Scientia. “There’s a cat that lives near my, ah. My friend’s house. It has a squashed face that has a remarkable resemblance…”

“Oh, ha ha,” Cor grumbled, and snatched the message out of her hands. “They letting anyone see her yet?”

“I just did,” the older girl said. “You’ll be fine.”

Cor was escorted up the elevator to the fourth floor, where the private rooms were. He was ushered into a small room that looked more like a bedroom than a hospital, even if there were incomprehensible machines beeping in the corner. The queen sat up in a bed in the middle of the room, wearing a simple gown and black clips in her hair. She had a sheaf of papers propped up on her knees, and she looked up at Cor with relief when he came in. 

“Thank the Six,” she said. “Sit down next to me. I need someone to hold these papers when I’m done.”

Cor tried not to gape. The queen had barely spoken to him since he first started working at the palace, save for a few brief orders to _take this to Master Armaugh_ or _run along._ Her hair was down, too, in long unruly strands over her shoulders, and when she frowned at the papers, her brows made a little crease in the middle that Cor had never seen before. 

“I asked you to sit, child,” she said. Cor grabbed a chair and walked it over to her bedside. She immediately dropped a stack of papers in his hands. 

“Organize them alphabetically by the names listed on the top left corner,” she said. “I asked Ilia Scientia earlier, but the blessed girl won’t stop _crying_ over me.”

Cor flipped through the papers, and bit his cheek. He hadn’t actually sat down to read anything since his parents died. He pulled a paper out with trembling fingers and set it aside. “If I may ask, ma’am,” he said. “Why was she crying? Aren’t you doing better?”

“That’s what I told her,” the queen said. She had a thick accent, not quite the crisp Tenebraean of Ms. Scientia’s, but something deeper, throatier. “But the girl’s sentimental, I suppose. She _was_ looking forward to seeing the baby. Mind that you don’t wrinkle the papers, child.”

Cor risked a glance at the Queen’s belly, but it was obscured by blankets and pages. The Queen lifted a pair of glasses to her nose, and her grey-blue eyes flicked towards Cor. He looked down. 

“There’s a message for you from the king,” Cor said, before he could be swamped by a hazy recollection of the alphabet. He passed it over, and the queen sighed. She took it, frowned a little deeper, and set it down. If she had a response to it, it wasn’t forthcoming, so Cor returned to his work. The clock on the wall clicked softly, and the scratch of the queen’s pen sounded like nails digging in the sand. 

“Tell me,” the queen said, after a few minutes had passed. “Are you an only child?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Cor looked up. The queen was still focused on the papers, eyes narrowed under her lenses. 

“Your parents have no interest in another?”

“They died, ma’am. Almost three years ago, now.”

The queen’s pen stilled. “Would you like me to apologize?” she asked. 

“Ma’am?” Her gaze was dark, almost sullen, a mirror image to Cor’s own. 

“It is customary in this country to apologize when someone dies,” the queen said. “Would you like me to?”

“I don’t know,” Cor said. “Does it help?”

“I haven’t the faintest notion,” said the queen. She continued writing. “I can never get used to it,” she said, in a softer voice. “So many apologies. Did _they_ cause this? Or the one before Regis? Why are they sorry? Why must _I_ be responsible for their guilt?”

She lifted her glasses and brushed her fingertips under her eyes. 

“What do they do where you’re from?” Cor asked. The queen stared at him. “When someone dies?”

The queen’s eyes went glassy. “They give you a blessing, for luck.”

“How do they do it?”

Again, the queen gave him that distant stare. She held out a hand. “Give me your hand. Hold your fingers like this. Good. Then you press down, and you…” She leaned over, and Cor felt the blood rush to his face as she pressed a feather-light kiss to his forehead. “And that’s how it’s done. Now. I’d like you to deliver these reports to the king’s secretary on your way back, so we must hurry.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cor said. “But. Um.” He stood, heart hammering, and kissed the queen of Lucis on the forehead. She scratched a line halfway across a graph. 

“For luck,” he croaked, and fell back into his seat in a rush. The queen blinked, and slowly handed him a completed report.

“Your name is Calvin?” she asked.

“Cor, ma’am. Cor Leonis.”

“Oh.” When the queen smiled, she looked so much like Regis that it was almost eerie. “Of course. I know you.”

Cor preened.

“You’re Aulea’s little cat.”

 

The next month, Cor was called into the queen’s private offices and informed that he was being given a promotion. He went from running around the Citadel at all hours to being the queen’s private lackey, which meant _more_ running, paper shuffling, and a terrifying amount of reading. When the queen caught him struggling to sound out words on his third day, she arranged for him to have lessons in the afternoons with the same tutors who taught the prince. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t,” he said. “I have… I have lessons with Aulea in the afternoon.”

“Do you?” the queen asked, and Cor felt his stomach descend into the depths of the Citadel. “What does young Aulea have to teach you?”

And that was how Cor ended up standing in front of a furious, red-faced Aulea in the Crownsguard training yards, with the queen, king, and a far too amused prince looking on. 

“You _told,_ ” Aulea hissed, as they went through the first of their practice drills.

“I panicked! I couldn’t lie to the queen!”

Aulea won, but it was a near thing. When they were shaking hands _just_ a little too tightly for comfort, the king called them both over. Aulea held onto the back of Cor’s shirt the whole time, and Cor was grateful for it after the king started to speak: On top of his new lessons from the prince’s tutors, he and Aulea were now going to be trained _together._ With Clarus and Regis. 

Regis turned pale. “I’m doomed,” he whispered to Cor, as he slumped along between them on their way to the toolshed. “I’m gonna get my ass handed to me by a nine-year-old, and Dad’s gonna disown me.”

Cor felt like he was floating. The king had told him that he had _talent._ He called him a… a… “What does a prodigy mean?” he asked. Aulea snorted.

“It means a natural,” she said. Cor couldn’t keep back a grin. “Don’t let it get to your head, kitten.”

“I’m a prodigy,” Cor said. “The king thinks I’m a _prodigy._ He killed seventeen people in the first five minutes of the battle of Leide, did you know?”

“Gods,” Regis groaned, and wrapped an arm around Cor’s neck. “Aulie’s right. You’re gonna be impossible.”

 

\---

 

It was Cor’s thirteenth birthday, and everything was going wrong.

“I’m a mess,” he said, in a low, miserable moan. “Look at this.”

“I’m looking,” Clarus said, from his post at the door of Cor’s small room. “I don’t see anything.”

Cor growled. He’d been fitted for a new uniform to commemorate his entry into the Crownsguard—the youngest member since the guard’s inception!—but that night, the night of his official swearing-in, his jacket had conveniently gone missing. His arms looked too skinny sticking out of his black and grey sleeves, no amount of Regis’ skill with concealer could cover up the acne scars on his cheek, and his hair…

“I’m gonna be a representative of the _crown,_ ” Cor said. “I can’t look like _this._ ”

“I manage fine,” Clarus said. Cor shot him a glare. Clarus was wearing his formal uniform, but most of the time, he opted for a white tank top and a leather jacket. Not very professional, in Cor’s opinion, but he wasn’t about to say it out loud. Not like he needed to—Clarus was uncannily adept at reading faces. 

He smirked, proving Cor right, and moved aside as the door swung open.

“We ain’t late?” Cid Sophiar, wild-haired and ancient for a man barely reaching thirty, burst through the door with Regis, Weskham, and Aulea at his back. Cid was wearing his best shirt and jeans, which meant he was only one _third_ covered in grease, and he had his four-year-old, Junior, clinging to the backs of his legs. “Don’t you look nice.”

“You’re right,” Cor said. “I _don’t._ ”

“Ah,” said Weskham. “Dramatics. I believe I’ll take this bottle of wine and wait it out—“

“No you don’t,” Clarus said, and reeled him in before he could back out the door. Aulea and Regis pushed past him, and Cor’s vision went dark as they pulled him into a tight embrace. Something hard jabbed him in the side, and he reached down to wrap his hands around the leather hilt of a katana. The sheath was a deeper red in the light of Cor’s bedroom, and when he drew it a few inches, the blade _shone._

“Aulea,” he said. “You can’t just give me this.”

“Sure I can,” Aulea said. She reached up and shoved something over his head, and he squeaked. “You earned it.”

Cor lifted off the hat she’d used to ruin his hair, and smiled. It was the same color as the sheath, with the Lucian crest on the front. He flipped it over and groaned. 

“ _Aulea._ ”

“It was my idea, actually,” Regis said, the traitor.

“Just a reminder,” Aulea said. She leaned down to kiss Cor on the cheek, and he stared disconsolately at the embroidered patch of a lion on the inside brim of the hat. “Can’t have you forgetting where you came from, my cat.”

Cor sighed and put the hat back on, and the entire room burst into riotous applause.


	4. Chapter 4

Cor Leonis looked down at the soft, weather-worn cap in his hands, running his fingers over the frayed patch on the brim. It had fallen halfway off when he was fifteen, when he had to drag himself through a gap in the fallen stone blocking off the Tempering Grounds from the empty Crownsguard base. He wasn’t even supposed to take the trial. The king had ordered him to stay back, to serve as backup should the scouting party need assistance, but then days had gone by without so much as a sign. So Cor had gone forward alone, into the dark, and the bodies of fallen Crownsguard soldiers had risen to their feet in the mimicry of a second, terrible life…

He crumpled the hat in his hands. Beside him, dwarfing the cheap plastic hospital chair that barely held his weight, Clarus Amicitia shifted in his sleep.

“I wish Cid were here,” Cor whispered. Cid always knew what to do. He was as hard-headed as Regis, always coming up against his orders when the others deferred to his status. It was the reason he’d left, after the treaty in Accordo went south and the magical wall retreated to the borders of Insomnia. He was still out there, holing up in his garage with his kids. He probably didn’t even know.

Someone should have told him. He would be there, if they had. Just like Weskham, who’d travelled all the way from his new place in Altissia and braved Regis’ cold shoulder just so he could sleep in a hospital chair at Clarus’ right side. 

A nurse strode by, bearing a small, squalling child with ragged black hair, and disappeared into the room on the other side of the hallway. Cor straightened.

_”Don’t look so glum, kitten,” Aulea told him, when he’d come to her that morning while Regis slept in his chair outside. “It’s a fever. If I can make it through a thirty hour labor and get beaten by a fever, what sort of queen am I?”_

_Her crown had been set aside, leaning on the window blinds of the hospital room. It flashed and glittered in the corner of Cor’s eye as he turned his face away, and he flinched at the clammy warmth of Aulea’s hand on his cheek._

_“Cor,” she said, and Cor looked into her pale, wan face, the sweat-damp forehead and shadowed eyes. “Tell me I’ll be fine.”_

_“You’ll be fine,” he said. She smiled, and patted his cheek._

_“Now say it like you mean it, my cat.”_

“You’ll be fine,” Cor whispered to the clean, quiet hall, and twisted his hat in both hands.

 

\---

 

The city mourned for months, but there was never really any time to grieve. 

The ring of the Lucii, Regis’ inheritance as king, had never taken so much from him as it did in the months after Aulea’s death. He showed the public the grim, wooden expression he’d mastered as a child, which Clarus and Aulea had tried for years to soften, and threw himself into advanced operations in the war. Niflheim was turning its eye on Galahd, imposing sanctions on countries that tried to do trade with the archipelago, and Regis was starting to discuss ways the Crystal could be used to supply extra protection for the Lucian subjects there. The newspapers called him _driven._ Cor and Clarus, in their turn, had another name for it.

“You need to _breathe,_ Reg,” Clarus said one afternoon, as the three of them convened from a meeting that had gone on for nearly four hours. “You can’t work yourself out of this.”

Regis turned his cold, impassive gaze to his shield. “Would you rather I retire to bed like a wilting flower?”

“Might wanna give it a try,” Clarus said, to Cor’s surprise. “I’ll settle for you getting something to eat. When was the last time you saw your son, Regis?”

If anything, the temperature in the room grew colder still. “Clarus Amicitia, lecturing _me_ on the importance of family time?”

“Sure would _like_ to see Lily and Gladio more,” Clarus told him. “But I have a duty to my king.”

“Then take the day off,” Regis said. He stood from his seat with a wince, and Clarus moved towards him despite the stricken look on his face. “If you find it to be such a burden. Cor can manage well enough as a bodyguard.”

Cor cleared his throat. “No, sir.”

Both older men stared, and Cor straightened his shoulders. “We all miss Aulea, your majesty,” he said. 

“I said nothing about Aulea, Leonis.”

“Due respect, sir,” Cor said, barreling through the rough terrain of insubordination and coming out the other side into true, mindless fear. “But… when she and I used to, to train, she told me—“

“Don’t presume to know what she would—“

“She said it was bullshit,” Cor said, and Regis’ eyes widened. “All this. Men pretending like it doesn’t hurt. It’s a king’s duty to serve his people, but you can’t do that when you’re working yourself to the grave.”

“We all miss her,” he said again, into the awful, breathless silence his words had carved out between them. He wished he could say how much. 

Clarus approached Regis carefully, as though he were a wild animal, and gently placed his hand on his upper back. “Come on, Reg,” he said. “My son’s been wanting to meet the prince for months. Why don’t we have a play date. Some dinner. Maybe that bourbon my father thought I’d never find, the one we snuck when you were eighteen.”

Regis sank into Clarus’ touch, and closed his eyes. 

“Very well,” he said, and both Clarus and Cor sighed as one. “You’re a terrible influence, you know.”

“I try,” Clarus said.

Cor joined them for dinner that night, sitting awkwardly between Clarus’ wife and Regis while Clarus’ three year-old son Gladio used Cor as a climbing post. 

“Read this,” he said, pushing a large hard-bound book in Cor’s hands. Cor looked helplessly at the others around the table—until this point, Aulea had managed to rescue him from story-time with Gladio, but all he saw now were self-satisfied smirks. Damn. He glanced down at Gladio, who looked up at him with the widest, most tearful amber eyes he’d ever seen, and sighed. 

“Alright,” he said. “You win.” Gladio grinned and settled with his back against Cor’s chest, kicking his knees as he pushed the book open. “Oh. It’s about a… princess in a paper bag.”

“He loves that one,” said Lily, Clarus’ wife. She rested her chin on both hands. “Make sure you do a good voice for the dragon.”

A soft hiccup sounded from the mobile crib in the corner, and Regis shot out of his seat. “Maybe his highness wants to hear the story, as well,” Clarus said, and Cor cast him a dirty look from over Gladio’s head. 

In the end, Lily had to do the voice of the dragon. After a good two minutes of his best attempts at a growl, Cor had been silenced by Gladio’s imperious assertion that, “You’re _bad_ at dragons, Uncle Cor,” and had to sit in disgraced silence while Gladio’s mother coughed and growled her way through the dragon’s lines. 

“Buck up, Leonis,” Regis said, from where he was walking around the room with a wailing, pink-faced Noctis. “You’ll get the hang of it one day.”

Cor covered Gladio’s eyes with one hand and flipped his king a rude gesture in the other, and for the first time in nearly half a year, Regis broke into a laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Niflheim!


	5. Chapter 5

“I always had nannies for this part,” the Queen Mother had said some two and a half years earlier, when Gladiolus Amicitia was nothing more than a red-faced, whimpering mess surrounded by walls painted with pictures of wooly garulets. The Queen Mother and Aulea looked pale in their black mourning dresses, like priestesses of Etro who stumbled into a flower garden by mistake. Lily took the newly-swaddled Gladio out of his crib and gestured towards Aulea.

“Oh, no,” Aulea said. She turned to Cor. “Let our new Captain of the Crownsguard have a chance.”

“Gods, please,” Cor said, as Lily walked towards him. “Clarus’ll kill me when I drop him.”

“Don’t worry,” Lily said. “You won’t. Don’t stand so stiff, sweetheart.” She held Gladio out to Cor, and Cor stared into Gladio’s wide, unassuming eyes. He gingerly slid the baby into his arms, settling his head awkwardly against his forearm.

“Close,” Aulea said. She swept in and adjusted Cor’s hold, and the baby blinked at her, looked up at Cor, and opened his mouth wide in a heartbroken sob. 

“Oh, well,” Aulea said, as a laughing Lily gathered Gladio up again. “Don’t let it get you down. He just needs to get to know you.”

 

\---

 

Cor parked his car—a ratty, toxic green disaster he’d swapped out at Cid’s garage—under one of Gralea’s broken streetlights, and breathed out steam against the window. The corpse of the Glacian had delayed the train into Niflheim, and Cor had spent a good three hours pacing the tracks, wishing he had a phone with which he could contact Clarus or Regis, while train workers took pickaxes to the frozen wheels. Since Cor’s attempts at speaking in Niflheim’s regional dialogue had resulted in Regis sobbing with laughter in a way a proper king had no right to, it was agreed that he’d only talk in case of an emergency. In the meantime, he got by on simple sign language and the occasional desperate bout of pointing. 

A better spy, someone trained for it, would probably have been the best pick for this mission. But hanging around the Citadel was starting to wear on Cor. He couldn’t train in the Crownsguard yards without tracing every step Aulea had taken. He couldn’t walk the halls of the Citadel without straining to hear her voice. He couldn’t even bear to be with Regis and Clarus, who were practically living in each other’s houses those days, trading their sons off between them like the worlds strangest barter system. _You watch Gladio in the office for two hours, and Lily and I will pick up his highness from daycare._ Aulea would have loved it.

She most _definitely_ would not have loved this.

 _Reckless,_ her voice said, as Cor dispatched a guard outside Gralea’s entrance to Niflheim’s premier research facility. 

_Foolish,_ she told him, as he stole the guard’s large, unwieldy snowmobile. 

_Cor Leonis,_ she cried, as he snuck into the labs outlined in Regis’ stolen blueprints. _If you die here, I will bring you back from the Astral Plane and take you down myself._

“Sorry, Aulie,” he whispered, using the guard’s security pass to slip through the first set of lab doors. He stripped computers down and pulled out memory cards and floppy disk drives, used a childhood’s worth of petty thievery to pick the locks of their file cabinets and classified records rooms, and discreetly took out MT patrols that monitored the lower floors. Those patrols started increasing the deeper he went, and the cold that permeated the walls of the facility gave way to the warmth of massive, inexplicable machines that whirred and rattled on the other side of wide viewing screens. 

Cor opened the door to the lab on the lowest level, and the green light from within gave his face a sickly pallor. Stacked in neat rows throughout the room were lines and lines of tubes, wide as the columns in the Citadel throne room, with green liquid gently swirling through the glass. The tubes were foggy, indistinct in the dark, but Cor could see enough.

The tube closest to him held a man.

He was young, hardly out of his teens, with blond hair and a brush of freckles across his nose. His eyes were closed as though in sleep, and his body floated in the tube like the lifeless form of a doll, held in place by the circular current. Cor forced down the taste of bile in his throat, and crouched low along the rows of tubes. Each one held a person: Sometimes a child, sometimes a man in his forties or fifties, all of them blond and pale and freckled, all with the same bone structure and slender size. He crept halfway up the stairs beyond them, then stopped, frozen in place, as a man in a scientist’s lab coat walked into the room carrying a child.

“Yes, sir,” he said, in a tense, sharp voice, pressing a phone to one ear as the infant wailed in his hands. He set the baby down on a long, steel table, and turned aside. “It won’t stick to them. They either undergo the daemonization process immediately, or there’s no presence of the Scourge whatsoever. As MT units, they’re too… yes, it could be the formula in the tank.”

The scientist placed his hand over the child’s mouth, muffling their cries. “That’s an entire batch lost, sir,” he said. “We’ll have to examine sets 4a through c to make sure they aren’t similarly defective. Yes, sir.” He hung up, dropping his phone on the table.

The child _screamed,_ small fists clawing at the air, and the man pressed down. Cor stood, throwing out his orders to remain _unseen_ with nothing but the soft shuff of his sword appearing from Regis’ armiger. He didn’t bother holding back—Something _cracked_ when the butt of his sword met the scientist’s temple, but he let him fall, turning instead to the small child shrieking on the examination table. 

“Hey,” Cor said. “I feel you, kid.” He shed his jacket, draping it over one end of the table, a dark shadow against the gleaming brightness of the lab. Then he stripped off his vest, and shivered in his thin cotton undershirt as he placed the vest next to the baby. The boy continued to wail, in great miserable coughing sobs, as Cor wound the vest around his body. He stopped at the strange feel of cloth against his skin, seemed to consider the new sensation, and started crying again.

“Yeah, it’s no fun,” Cor said. He inexpertly tucked in the ends of the vest, shrugged on his jacket, and picked up the boy in both arms. He was a scrawny little thing—underfed, if Noctis and Gladio were anything to go by, and startled into shocked silence at being held. Cor could see the faint, almost transparent tuft of blond hair, and turned to look at the rows of men floating in their silent tubes.

“Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing myself into a corner with this one, I'm afraid. It's happening a lot more lately, but I'm afraid part of it may be that things aren't going so well right now. People who say depression creates more art may need to rethink that assessment. I write better when I'm NOT depressed, so at the moment I'm taking it slower so I can take care of myself. Sorry for the longer periods between updates. I assure you that my writing will be much better once I am out of this hole!


End file.
